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Birthplace of the World's First Business Computer - The Norwalk Hour* Remington Rand's First Computer - A Short History by W.B.Wenning Birthplace - Notes Specific to Development in Rowayton Birthplace - A Time Line by W.B.Wenning and Eric Rambusch The Computer Age Began in a Barn - The New York Times, March 29, 1998 Computer Pioneers - The Darien News-Review,* April 9, 1998 Computer Pioneers - The Norwalk Weekly Life & Times, April 2, 1998* Memories of Electronic Dawn - The Norwalk Hour* The History of Computing *Slight editing applied to correct errors of fact

Memories of Electronic Dawn:
Area Residents Recall Building the World's
First Business Computer in a Rowayton Barn

By Peter Davenport
Staff Writer
The Norwalk Hour

Copyright ©1998 The Hour Newspapers
Reprinted by Permission

Jacob Randmer and five fellow engineers from the former Remington Rand Corporation gathered in Rowayton last Sunday afternoon to recall their work a half-century ago on the RR Model 409 - the world's first business computer.

A university engineer and expert in calculator technology, Lorin P. Crosman was recruited in 1943 by the Rand company. He was sent to work at a place then known as the "barn," a former horse stables that lay across the road from Remington Rand's main headquarters on Highland Avenue in Rowayton.

Over the next few years, Crosman and the engineering staff designed and built the Model 409. Although the machine was by modern standards little more than a large calculator – or a million times less powerful than a modern PC and 1,000 times more expensive – nothing like it had ever been built. Crosman and his colleagues were pioneers, exploring the dawn of the computer age.

"The 409 was aimed at doing repetitive jobs such as tax compilation and payroll computation, things that you could rerun again and again," said Randmer, a Wilton resident. It was novel technology when the machine debuted in 1951, beating every other electronic machine maker to market. including Big Blue.

"The Model 409 was important because it was the first," Randmer said. "It came onto the market before IBM came out with any of its machines."

During the gathering last Sunday, which was sponsored by the Rowayton Historical Society, Randmer and others recalled building the 409 from scratch. Although the first electric computer had been built at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II, and a few firms had built military computers – to measure trajectories and break enemy codes – the concept of a machine that could autonomously add, multiply and divide for commercial ventures was novel.

Moreover, what little computer work was going on in other industries went largely unnoticed by those working inside the walls of Rand's barn. "For the 409, there was nothing we could draw on," said Bill Wenning, another former engineer. "This was a program that [company founder] Jim Rand did not want to make public. He did not want his engineers going to conferences, he did not want them roaming the halls of universities and he did not want any government money."

Research for Remington Rand computers started in 1943 at the company's headquarters in Brooklyn. In 1945, Jim Rand moved the corporate headquarters to Rockledge, a sprawling estate on Highland Avenue in Rowayton. Across the road from the main house lay the barn, a former stable.

But although the old stables still smelled of horses, and the engineers and technicians worked 12-hour days, six days a week, the surviving crew remembered those days as exciting, heady days.

"It was the best of times," recalled John Carmichael, a technician who joined Remington Rand right out of the U.S. Marine Corps. "You really loved to come to work in the morning, and you hated to go home. It was exciting and new to all of us."

And gradually, the 409 began to take shape. According to Wenning, the computer was "a monster." Measuring eight feet in length, five feet high and two feet wide, it required 8,000 Watts of electricity, a few thousand vacuum tubes, switches, and relays. The heat it generated could be overwhelming.

"We ran into a lot of heat problems," Carmichael said. "Offices were not air conditioned in those days. To sit alongside one of those machines on a summer day was a thrill."

The Model 409, and its successor, the Univac 60/120, received data through punch cards, which were typed up by operators using keypunches and then fed into the machine. The machine would then calculate the problem and print out an answer. Everything was processed through vacuum tubes, which were constantly failing. Wenning said the tube problem was "one of the greatest hurdles in the 409 days," and credited Randmer helping solve it by developing a new one.

In 1951, the Model 409 prototype was unveiled to a gathering of military and government officials in the barn, which today houses the Rowayton Public Library and Community Center. In 1952, the company shipped its first business computer to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS loved it and ordered two more.

During the development of the 409, Remington Rand bought Univac, a Pennsylvania-based computer maker that had already made a name for itself.

In 1953 the company modified the Model 409 and sold it as the Univac 60/120, which was very successful until the late 1950s.

When the company began losing market share to IBM around that time, it decided to create a new computer: the Univac 1004. Code named "bumblebee" because many senior managers doubted it would fly, the 1004 turned out to be a huge hit.

"It was the most popular computer of its time,' said Ron Smith, director of system tools development for Unisys Corp., which later absorbed Rand's computer division. Its integration of transistors, a high speed printer and card reading technology also made the 1004 "one of the most important computers in history."

But while much has been written about the Univac 1004, whose durability led to its widespread ground use in Vietnam War and Middle East oil fields well into the 1970s, as well as successive generations of Unisys mainframes, virtually nothing was known about its predecessor until Rowayton Historical Society President Erik Rambusch began digging around Rowayton a few years ago.

"A few years ago, the library set up a web site with the interesting phrase: 'Birthplace of the first business computer’," Rambusch said.

While everyone thought the computer was the Univac 1004, Rambusch did some digging and found Wenning, who remembered working on the 409.

Interestingly, no written record remains of the 409 - even in the corporate record of Unisys, which eventually took over successors of Rand. What models were made are thought to be long gone. Still, the work that started in a stable 50 years ago did leave its mark.